


The Man of a Thousand Faces

by aspermoth



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Comment Fic, Eleventh Doctor Era, Gen, Introspection, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-31
Updated: 2012-01-31
Packaged: 2017-10-30 10:16:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aspermoth/pseuds/aspermoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once a year, Judy Drake serves the same man at the cafe where she works. She knows it's the same man, even though he wears a different face every single time. And she calls him the Man of a Thousand Faces. Today, she's going to talk to him for the first time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man of a Thousand Faces

There's a café hidden somewhere in the depths of an English city, a small cosy place of dark wood, red-and-white polka dot curtains, and flowers on the tables. It's a place that time has almost forgotten. Its hours are its own, and they are usually late: it is a place for the night owls with their quiet contemplation, the students on their laptops typing papers for the next day and drinking coffee like their lives depended on it, the lonely stragglers with their dog-eared books or crumpled newspapers. They never come in until the sun goes down and they are never all gone until it has risen again.

The café has only three employees: the owner and manager, a mysterious elderly gentleman known only as Mr Smith who spends most of time secreted away in his office; the barista and short-order cook, Benny, a gentle young man with chronic insomnia; and the waitress, Judy Drake.

Judy is twenty-seven, and she has been working in the café since she turned sixteen. She is a small, angular woman with bony elbows and prematurely white hair that's fine and soft like dandelion fluff. She always intended to leave and go to university, to make something of herself, but she never has. And the reason for that is the Man of a Thousand Faces.

She calls him that because every time she sees him, he has a different face. Not just a different expression: an entirely different face.

On her first day, he was an old man in slightly Edwardian garb whom she nervously served tea and biscuits. He was polite enough to her, it was true, but there was something about him that put her on edge. She's good at reading people and she knew that this man was not one to be crossed, even by accident, despite his kind heart.

She did not know then that he was the Man of a Thousand Faces, or that she would stay here for him.

Exactly a year later, he came back. Judy knew it was the same man, even though everything about him seemed to be different: his clothes, his hair, his face, his eyes, even his personality. He was a new man, a gentler man, a different man, yet still the same. She served him the same order as the year before and he seemed pleased enough with it.

That was the moment that Judy trapped herself in the café, although she didn't know it consciously. And she still had not named him.

She named him the Man of a Thousand Faces on his third visit to the café, this time as a blondish gentleman in a frilled shirt and a smoking jacket. It was in this year, the year when she should have been going to university to study literature like she'd always planned, that she realised that she could no more leave the café than she could fly to the moon. So she rented herself a cheap little flat and settled down to a half-life of waiting for him to come back.

The years passed by, and once a year, the Man of a Thousand Faces returned on the same night, each time with a brand new face.

A mad man in a striped scarf wielding a bag of jelly babies.

A pleasant younger man in a traditional cricket outfit.

A rather abrasive man with curly hair and a complete lack of colour co-ordination.

A lighter-hearted man with a question mark umbrella.

An auburn-haired man with a wide-eyed expression and a knowing smile.

A much sadder, angrier man with close cropped hair and a leather jacket.

A very lonely man in a suit and trainers who felt much older than he looked.

She has seen them all, and served them all tea. And she knows that they are all the same man, and not just because half of them apparently have the same habit of dressing in the dark. There's just something... different about them, something they all share. Something, she would almost say, that wasn't quite human.

Today is the day that the Man of a Thousand Faces is set to return once again.

It is a quiet night, tonight; dead, even. Just past midnight, yet the regulars are elsewhere, despite the fact that it is a clear, starry night with a bright full moon, a night that would normally be busy. Judy has been sitting in a corner reading an old copy of _The Fellowship of the Ring_ for the past two hours without a single customer, a most unusual event. Benny the barista and short order chef is – unusually – asleep on a camp bed in the kitchen; she has had no need to wake him.

The Man of a Thousand Faces should arrive any minute, and Judy is looking forward to it, in fact. She has already set up the table by the window – his favourite spot – with a teapot, teacup, milk jug and sugar bowl. Now all she has to do is wait for him to arrive so she can boil the kettle and fetch the biscuits. She always brings a selection; his favourite varies from face to face.

A ringing bell signals the opening of the door. Judy looks up. It's him.

The Man of a Thousand Faces sits down at the table, eats a small lump of sugar from the bowl, and looks through the window, smiling up at the moon like he knows her. He is younger than she has ever seen him before and yet there is something older about him, too: something in the set of his mouth, perhaps, or just a feeling in the air around him of a man who has seen and suffered too much. He has a wide, pale forehead and sad eyes.

Judy puts down her book, smiles a greeting, and dashes into the kitchen to get the kettle boiling and arrange the plate of biscuits. Her fingers are vibrating with a mix of nerves and excitement, and when the kettle is boiled and she picks it up, her hands are shaking. But tonight is the night that she will sit down with the Man of a Thousand Faces and find out once and for all who the hell he is and how he changes his face.

The kettle in one hand and the biscuit plate balanced deftly on the fingertips of the other, she returns to the front of the house. She and the Man of a Thousand Faces are the only ones there, in the quiet café lit with candlelight and moonlight and swathed in warm, wide shadows.

"Morning sir," she says, placing the plate in the centre of the table and lifting the lid from the teapot to pour in the boiling water.

"Morning already?"

"just past midnight."

He shrugs in a "Whaddya know" way, then takes a Jammy Dodger from the plate, examines it for a moment, and slips it into his pocket before taking another. Judy raises her eyebrows and he smiles.

"You never know when it might come in handy."

"Who doesn't need an EJD, I say?"

"EJD?"

"Emergency Jammy Dodger."

Judy puts the kettle down on the next table over and picks up the teapot, pouring out a cup for each of them. She has waited eleven years for this moment. She takes a deep breath.

"Do you mind if I join you?"

He shakes his head and she sits down, glances out of the window at the mournful face of the distant moon. She wants to dive right in – demand to know who he is, what's he's doing here, how he changes his face – but her words fail her. Instead, she picks up her teacup, blows gently on the surface to cool it, and takes a sip. He takes a bite out of his biscuit.

Time seems to melt away, soft and velvet around them. Judy stares straight into those sad, old eyes in that young, young face.

"Who are you?"

"Hm?"

"You come in here once a year on exactly the same day, and don't try to deny it because I _know_ it's you, but every time you come in, you have a different face. You've been doing it for eleven years. I _know_ you have. Who are you?"

"I'm the Doctor."

"... _the_ Doctor? Not... Doctor Jones or Doctor Foster or whatever, just 'The Doctor'?"

"That's me."

"More pithy than 'The Man of a Thousand Faces', I suppose," she mutters.

He cocks his head to one side and frowns.

"What?"

Judy feels her face grow hot as she blushes.

"Oh, it's… it's the nickname I gave you. The Man of a Thousand Faces. It seemed fitting."

There is a brief pause. Then Judy blurts out, "You aren't human, are you?"

The Doctor smiles and slowly shakes his head.

"I'm a Time Lord, the last of the Time Lords, from the planet Gallifrey."

She blinks, surprised. "You're an _alien_? Is that how you keep changing your face?"

He nods and takes another bite out of his biscuit. Judy sips her tea and looks at him closely. He certainly looks human enough, but he has never felt human to her. But to have it confirmed is still somewhat of a shock.

"Why are you here?" she asks quietly. "Why this café? Why this planet? Why here?"

He shrugs. "Nowhere else in the universe can brew such a nice cup of tea. Why am I telling you all of this?"

"I just have one of those faces, I suppose."

She drains the last of her tea and sets the cup down.

"You can come more often than once a year. If you'd like to, I mean," she says hesitantly. "We don't bite. And... you look like you need it. The companionship, I mean."

He looks at her with those sad, old eyes, a deep questioning look that makes her feel like he's looking into her soul, then nods.

"I just might take you up on that."

Then the bell on the door rings and a long-haired, dishevelled, poetical type with a volume of Oscar Wilde tucked under his arm ambles in. Judy gives the Doctor an apologetic smile.

"Got to go, I'm afraid. Duty calls."

She returns to the register to take the poetical gent's order – dry scrambled egg, crispy bacon, strong black coffee – and glances briefly back to the Doctor. He's staring through the window again at the moon, like an old friend, and she almost wishes she could just stand there and watch him for hours, but she has a job to do, and she must go the kitchen and wake Benny and please the customers. And by the time she has returned, the table by the window is deserted, the tea-set abandoned and lonely with a crisp ten pound note lying atop the tray.

The Doctor – the Man of a Thousand Faces – is gone.


End file.
